Highest Selling Debut Offering at Premiere Napa Valley Auction Breaks $1000/Bottle Barrier for Napa Valley Wines
Napa, CA (PRWEB) March 26, 2014 -- The highest selling debut offering at this year’s Premiere Napa Valley is the exclusive bottling of Pulido-Walker’s 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon from Melanson Vineyard. Arkansas’ Cliffewood Wine Syndicate purchased the Lot of sixty bottles of this single vineyard designate wine for $65,000. Of the 225 wineries in the Auction, Pulido~Walker joined a handful that broke through the $1000 per bottle barrier. All monies raised benefit Napa Valley Vintners’ important work to protect and enhance this amazing wine region.
Award-winning winemaker, Thomas Rivers Brown, hand selected and blended wines from Pulido-Walker’s best barrels of Clone 7 and 337 for the Auction Lot—‘The Possible’. Grown on Napa Valley’s Pritchard Hill, the super concentrated berries are powerfully expressive of the site with flavors of black fruit, crushed rock, and exotic white flower aromatics. Higher tannins give the wine more structure with less weight on the palate and promise drinkability for decades to come. The lot is being aged for 20 months in 100% new French Oak and forms the core of Pulido-Walker Cabernet Sauvignon from Melanson Vineyard.
Focusing solely on 100% Cabernet Sauvignon single vineyard designates, Pulido-Walker makes wine from two distinctive Napa Valley vineyards where the natural alchemy of geography, soil, climate, and clone combine to yield a wine greater than the sum of its parts. Panek Vineyard blankets a rocky, gently sloping knoll in the shadow of the Mayacamas Mountains along the old Napa River bed wash, and Melanson Vineyard is located on iconic Pritchard Hill with its steep and rugged, boulder-strewn grounds. The 2012 vintage will be Pulido-Walker’s third release of wine from each Vineyard. The 2011 Panek Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon is sold out; the 2011 Melanson Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon will be released in August 2014.
Proprietors Mark Pulido and Donna Walker grew up in pharmacy families, and this early common experience is integral to the Pulido~Walker philosophy. Their scientific backgrounds make Mark and Donna precise, inquisitive, and detailed; they know that perseverance and attentive observation yield results worth waiting for. Few people have the commitment or the endurance—never mind the conviction of their principles—to completely reframe the experiment mid-stream.
Although they had ’08 and ’09 vintages in barrel, Mark and Donna postponed the launch of their winery to investigate what new vineyards and a new winemaker could contribute in terms of quality. Experts concurred that these early vintages were very good, but Mark and Donna insisted that Pulido~Walker had to be better than very good. It had to be extraordinary.
Pulido-Walker’s wine label is inscribed with an ancient apothecary weight bearing the seasonal symbols of alchemy. This Old World instrument of precise measure expresses the family’s dedication to the perfection of every element to craft extraordinary wine. The successful debut offering of Pulido~Walker at Premiere Napa Valley is another step in Mark and Donna’s patient pursuit of ‘The Possible’.
For more about Pulido-Walker, please visit: http://pulidowalker.com/.
Judy Rowcliffe, Rowcliffe Communications Grp, +1 (415) 456-4131, [email protected]
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